John Paul Getty III

John Paul Getty III, who died on Saturday aged 54, was once the favourite
grandson of the world's richest man but, cursed by the trappings of fabulous
wealth, never found health nor happiness.

7:41PM GMT 07 Feb 2011

As a tall, freckle-faced youth of 16, he was kidnapped by a gang of Italian petty criminals who blindfolded him and chained him to a stake for five months. Eventually they cut off his right ear as evidence of their willingness to kill him unless a ransom was paid.

As a young man, when drink and drugs began to take their toll

Eight years later, and by then addicted to a cocktail of alcohol and hard drugs including heroin and cocaine, Getty was the victim of a near-fatal stroke that left him a quadriplegic, almost blind, and confined to a wheelchair. For the rest of his life, unable even to enunciate his own name, he had to be spoon-fed, dressed, bathed and cared for around the clock by his mother, Gail, and a team of carers.

With only peripheral vision, Getty had problems communicating, and could emit only a high-pitched scream. Worse, his relationship with his father, Sir John Paul Getty II, had broken down when his parent – who in 1976 had inherited a quarter of the Getty Trust, worth at least $1.3 billion – refused to pay his son's medical bills, running at £16,000 a month.

This dysfunctional state of affairs eventually took both Gettys to court in Los Angeles, where Gail appealed for help from her billionaire ex-husband. A judge ruled in the son's favour, and Getty junior moved into a house in Beverly Hills which, according to the drugs guru Dr Timothy Leary, was "just a hi-tech hospital disguised as a house".

Leary said that all the medical equipment was concealed behind sliding walls of wood panelling. The house could be transformed into a sophisticated medical centre at the touch of a button. Lasers, X-ray machines and even a private blood bank were to hand in case of emergency.

Related Articles

Getty's predicament meant that he was effectively confined to this gilded medical ward, but occasionally he would break out; on a flying visit to London in the mid-1980s, for example, he spent an evening at Tramp, the nightclub in St James's. But while his confinement led to the breakdown of his marriage, the estrangement from his reclusive Anglophile father – invested with an honorary knighthood in 1998 for his charitable works – ended a few years later in reconciliation.

After his death in 2003 Sir John Paul Getty II left the bulk of his fortune, estimated at £200 million, to his second son, Mark, bequeathing Paul chattels worth £50,000 and an unspecified share of a family fund.

By then John Paul Getty III had moved with his mother to Gurthalougha House, a Victorian lodge with its own 100-acre estate on the shores of Lough Derg in Co Tipperary. He had even, in 1999, and along with six other members of his family, become a citizen of the Irish Republic under the controversial "investment for passports" scheme (which has since been abolished).

Latterly John Paul Getty III had lived at Wormsley, his father's mansion in the Buckinghamshire Chilterns, set in 3,000 rolling acres, with a mock castle, ornamental lakes, cricket pitch and a specially-built tower which houses a library containing many of the world's oldest and rarest books. One of the estate cottages at Wormsley was adapted for Getty's wheelchair, and the house was fitted with the latest medical equipment to make his existence as comfortable as possible.

John Paul Getty III was born on November 4 1956, the firstborn son of the American John Paul Getty II, and struck his normally misanthropic grandfather, John Paul Getty I, as "a bright, red-haired little rascal… most cheerful and cute". Paul, as the boy was known, spent his childhood in Rome, where his father ran the Italian division of the family oil business. The temptations of la dolce vita proved irresistible, and in 1964 Getty père divorced Paul's mother, childhood sweetheart Gail Harris, and married Talitha Pol, the beautiful step-granddaughter of the painter Augustus John.

After his parents broke up, Paul saw little of his father, who spent much of the 1960s in England and north Africa in a drug-induced haze.

Paul missed his father badly, and without his influence also fell into a life of excess; by his 15th birthday he was partying hard, taking drugs and crashing expensive motorbikes and cars. He was reportedly expelled from no fewer than seven schools, the last being the staid St George's English School in Rome in early 1971, by which time he had determined on an artistic career. He started selling his own paintings to local trattoria, and supplementing what he made by modelling nude for life classes.

On July 10 1973, when he was 16 and living in a small apartment with two young painter friends, the long-haired young man was kidnapped at 3am in the Piazza Farnese by a Mafia gang who sent a ransom note demanding £17 million for his safe return.

Like the police, some members of the Getty clan initially suspected that the note was either a hoax, a joke, or a ruse by the rebellious teenager – dubbed "the Golden Hippie" by the press – to extract money from his notoriously tight-fisted grandfather. A second demand was received, but it had been held up for three weeks by a postal strike, and when John Paul Getty II asked his father for the ransom money, the old man refused. (At the time Getty II was an employee of his father's oil company and claimed to have no resources beyond his salary.)

The billionaire head of the Getty clan, then 80, made clear his attitude to paying ransom money in a statement to the press: "I have 14 grandchildren, and if I pay a penny of ransom, I'll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren."

Events took a more sinister turn in November when Rome's daily newspaper Il Messagero received an envelope containing a hank of hair and a decomposing human ear. With it was another note threatening the boy with further mutilation unless a ransom now set at £3.2 million was paid.

"This is Paul's ear," the note said. "If we don't get some money within 10 days, the other ear will arrive. In other words he will arrive in little pieces." The threat finally galvanised John Paul Getty senior into agreeing to pay a ransom, though he insisted on making it a loan repayable by his son, John Paul Getty II, at four per cent interest.

In the event, Getty senior cut a deal with the kidnappers and reportedly paid out just under $3 million for the return of his grandson.

The boy, having spent his 17th birthday in captivity, was found shivering on a snow-covered motorway between Rome and Naples on December 15 1973, shortly after the ransom was paid. He was in poor shape: thin, filthy and bloodstained, he was still in pain from the makeshift ear amputation, infection had set in and he was cold and malnourished. Although his kidnappers had pumped him with penicillin, the doses had been so enormous that Paul had become allergic to it. When he telephoned his grandfather at his Tudor mansion at Sutton Place in Surrey to express his gratitude, the old man refused to take the call.

After two weeks recuperating in a private clinic, followed by an Austrian skiing holiday, Paul turned for solace to his girlfriend, a small-time German actress called Martine Zacher, and seemed less traumatised by his ordeal than his mother, who plunged into deep depression. Less than a year after his release from captivity, John Paul Getty III and Martine Zacher married. At 24, she was six years his senior; she was also five months pregnant.

The bride wore black, and Getty himself, clad in a Mao-style suit, was in such a dishevelled state that the presiding official in Siena struggled to make him understand or follow the ceremony. Getty's grandfather not only believed he had married too young, but that he had broken a legal injunction prohibiting him marrying before he was 22, and disqualified him from receiving an income from the family trust.

By the mid-1970s John Paul Getty III was trying to make a new life in Los Angeles, but was suffering serious effects from his kidnap and incarceration. He was paranoid, unable to sleep, and had become dependent on brandy (which his captors had administered to him in captivity). He turned to drugs, the effects of which impacted on his marriage and on his efforts to study Chinese History at Pepperdine University in Malibu, for which his grandfather had made him a small allowance.

John Paul Getty I died in 1976, reputedly worth between $2,000 and $4,000 million, the old man's will gave strict orders that control of his estate was not to pass to his grandson. The will included generous bequests to 12 women friends who had "comforted" the oil magnate in his dotage, but John Paul Getty III issued a statement from his London hotel saying he did not begrudge them a penny. "Not all the Getty family are interested in becoming billionaires," he added.

Nevertheless John Paul Getty III remained the principal beneficiary of the Sarah C Getty Trust, and inherited a fortune.

Shortly afterwards, seven men believed to have been Paul's kidnappers, and thought to have tenuous links with the 'Ndrangheta, the Calabrian Mafia, were tried; they received prison sentences of between four and 10 years. Apart from a few thousand lire (all the notes had been microfilmed) discovered on one of the accused, none of the ransom money was ever found.

In 1977 John Paul Getty III underwent surgery at a hospital in Los Angeles to be fitted with a new ear to replace the one hacked off by his kidnappers four years earlier. The procedure involved a series of delicate operations involving rib cartilage grafts.

By then the young man had supplemented his cocaine and heroin habit with a daily bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon; even so, he had shown signs of calming down, and through Martine had met the avant-garde German director Wim Wenders, who offered him some acting work. Having appeared in a few bit parts, in early 1981 Paul was cast in a major role in Wenders's new film The State of Things.

But in April he suffered catastrophic liver failure, as his body crumpled beneath his drinking and the drugs he had been prescribed to help him kick the habit. For a time his brain was starved of oxygen.

After six weeks in a coma, he emerged with impaired speech, negligible vision and paralysed from the neck down. Getty biographers note however, that he proceeded to demonstrate extraordinary willpower – submitting to a daily regime of painful exercise, physiotherapy and speech therapy. By 1987 his partial recovery was such that he was able to visit concerts and cinemas, and even – strapped to a metal frame – to ski again.

John Paul Getty III's marriage to Martine was dissolved in 1993; his son, the film actor and model Paul Balthazar Getty, known as Balty, survives him.